• Beef & Pork Meatball Sandwich

  w/ Lemon Ricotta 11

• Roast Pork Sandwich w/ Preserved Chilies 9

w/ House-Made Russian Dressing 11

• House-Made 100% Beef Hot Dog 5

add Kimchi & Kewpie Mayo +.50

add Chow Chow & Kewpie Mayo +.50

add House-Made Sauerkraut +.50

add Chili! +1

• CHILI! (NY beef & beans) 7

in a bread bowl +3

Cold Lunch

Roast Beef 8

Pastrami 8

Smoked Ham & Cheddar 8

Dickson’s Muffaletta 9

Chicken Salad 7

Homestyle Meatloaf Sandwich 7

Sides

• Zapp’s Potato Chips 1.5
• Water 1.5
• Gus Soda 2.5

Roasted Chickens come out of the oven at 3pm.  Take one home today!  Call to reserve yours: 212.242.2630

House-Made Hot Dog 5 each

add Chili! +1

add Chow Chow +.50

add Kimchi & Kewpie Mayo +.50

add Sauerkraut +.50

Chili (NY Beef & Beans) 7

Chili in a Bread Bowl ! +3

SIDES

Zapps Potato Chips 1.5

Water 1.5

Gus Soda 2.5

Cold Sandwiches are not available on Sunday.

Our Easter lambs (also known as baby lambs) weigh 20-25lbs and come from Woolley Sheep Farm in Rutland NY. The meat is tender and delicious.  Perfect for slow roasting in a home oven, smoker or on the grill.  A classic Easter feast for any sized group.  Easter lamb is a special treat we carry only once a year!

Worried about cooking a whole/half lamb at home?  Check out this easy recipe from Roman-Style Easter Lamb from Saveur or this one for Spanish-Style Roast Suckling Lamb

Offal ($10)
Because we sell the lambs by the half, we sell the offal (head, heart, and liver and testicles) separately.  All are vacuum sealed for freshness and easy freezing.   Add offal to my order!

Butchering Options
In the shop, we’ll butcher your lamb if you so desire.  $5 for basic primals (shoulder, legs, loin) up to $30 (fully broken down to retail cuts, tied roasts, frenched racks…).  Please call once your order has been placed to discuss if you’d like to go this route.

ORDER A LAMB

We’re also taking orders for our Easter Hams!

A classic, city-style, boneless ham. Brined for seven days and smoked for twenty hours with hickory and applewood. Moist and tender, with perfectly balanced salty, sweet, and smoky flavors.  Excellent for slow roasting and applying your favorite glaze.

ORDER A HAM

Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

Recently, I have made the argument in a couple of different articles (here and here) that in order to make local-regional meat broadly affordable and accessible, we should make a shift from the direct markets (farmers markets, CSAs, on-farm sales) to the existing indirect, arms length markets of supermarkets (and mom and pop groceries and butcher shops).

Coming from me, if you know my politics and you know the history of my writings, this is a shocking claim. Nevertheless, I have been thinking about it very hard over the last few days, in light of the comments I have received, and I do still think it is the right thing to do. Given our meat-intensive culture, it is unfair to ask people of limited means to eat only cheap cuts and/or to substantially reduce their meat consumption. As I argued yesterday, bucking one’s cultural impulses often takes Herculean efforts. Being poor is challenging enough already; we shouldn’t also force counter culturalism on poor people. As much as I dislike our culture of rampant, unbridled meat consumption, I think, until we are able to change that culture — and I truly hope we are able to — that poor people have as much right to it as the well-off. I believe it so strongly that I see making local-regional meat broadly affordable and readily available as an ethical imperative.

Why, or how, is it that when supermarkets are so much a part of our food, socio-economic, and health problems that it could possibly be supermarkets that can answer this call? It’s something like sleeping with the enemy, isn’t it?

Yes, and no.

First, I need to admit right up front that this effort could fail miserably, for a few reasons.

1. As far as being able to gather enough local-regional meat together to be able to satisfy the daily needs of supermarkets, I might very much be putting the cart before the horse. Without the necessary infrastructural developments already in place, making this effort might be impossible.
2. We can only move into supermarkets if it means not compromising our farming ethics, especially as it relates to animal welfare, environmental/ecological concerns, and our belief that farmers should be fairly compensated for their work. It might be possible that supermarkets are unwilling or unable to pay farmers what they need to be paid without compromising those values.
3. Even if we can get local-regional meat into supermarkets, it might only be possible by pricing meat at levels that are still out of the reach of people of limited means.

Nevertheless, right now, at this moment, I believe that supermarkets are the only way to make local-regional meat as broadly affordable and readily available as I would like to make it. As I have said, I want local-regional sales to account for 30% of total sales, not 2%.

In terms of expanding access by making local-regional meat more broadly available and affordable, volume is the key. Currently, local-regional agriculture is carried out very much on a small scale. Each individual farm produces a low-volume of meat. Many, perhaps most, of these farms raise a dozen or two, maybe thirty, or as many as forty pigs per year.

Dickson’s Farmstand Meats, the butcher shop I work with in New York City, alone needs thirty pigs per month. That means that in order to satisfy his needs, Jake Dickson would need to work with twelve different low-volume farmers in order to meet his needs. That would be a logistical and bookkeeping nightmare, not to mention that working with so many farmers substantially increases the likelihood that a farmer here and there is going to flake out and either not make a delivery or come up short or not send the sort of animal (finish-wise) that she/he promised. So, instead, Jake sought out and found just a few local-regional farmers to work with that are farming on a larger scale than the typical low-volume local-regional farm, including me. Working with fewer farmers substantially reduces the time it takes to manage logistics and bookkeeping, and it also makes it so the quality of the meat on offer at the shop is more consistent, and more reliably delivered, than it would be if it were coming from twelve different farms.

Jake’s is a small butcher shop, located in a high end market, frequented by people that are definitely not of limited means, so in spite of the fact that he is buying wholesale — I will sell him more than 250 pigs this year — he is able to compensate his farmers fairly. Those of us who are working with Jake are able to make a living.

What about a supermarket? Assuming that it would be possible for us to meet the volume needs of supermarkets, which would be substantially higher than at Dickson’s, would they be able (and willing) to compensate farmers fairly, especially if they were offering local-regional meat at more affordable prices?

I believe they would be able to, but not without us making some changes on our end. We would need to add to our plethora of small-scale local-regional farms a large number of mid-sized farms, composing an “agriculture of the middle,” that raise not a couple or a few dozen pigs per year, but 500-1,000+. If you think that in order to raise that many pigs, animal welfare or environmental/ecological concerns need to be compromised, check out Jude Becker’s operation (6,000 pigs per year), or Greg Gunthorp’s (1,000 pigs per year), or Paul Willis’s (2,500 pigs per year). Also, Animal Welfare Approved, which has the highest animal welfare standards around, has plenty of pig farmers farming at this scale.

Scale does two things. First, it makes it so the supermarkets can work with us. They wouldn’t be willing to work with 100 different farmers to meet their needs. Second, it means that the farmers that they do work with can be paid less for their pigs and still make a living. If the farmers are paid less, and we have done the hard work to convince supermarkets of the value of making local-regional meat more broadly affordable, then that lower compensation can translate into lower prices for local-regional meat on the supermarket shelves.

Will it ever be as cheap as industrial meat? No, and I have never argued that it would, or should, be. Will local-regional meat on the supermarket shelves be substantially cheaper than at farmers markets, on the farm, or through CSAs (none of which we should do away with, by the way)? Yes, absolutely, but once again, to get it there requires a shift in our approach to local-regional farming; it requires scaling up from low-volume farms to an agriculture of the middle, which can be, and where it already exists is, every bit as ethical and sustainable.

As ever, let’s get to work.

Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

Usually when I make the argument that we should find ways to make local-regional meat more broadly affordable, someone will make an argument against my position by pointing out that local-regional meat, even at its current high prices, is already affordable. They argue that it is already affordable in two ways. 1) There are always cheap cuts that go for just a few dollars a pound. If you are a person of limited means, just forgo the expensive chops and steaks and go for the cheap cuts. And 2) Expensive local-regional meat can be made more affordable by eating less of it. If you are a person of limited means, just cut, substantially, your meat consumption.

I am a person in a situation that I think provides a worthwhile perspective on this argument. The position that I am in is that I want to see us make important cultural changes that will radically change the face of our farm and food systems, yet I myself find it difficult, or even impossible, to make the very cultural changes I call for. While some might call this hypocrisy, I call it admitting to being subject to the very real forces of culture.

You see, we are bound to our culture(s) in a fundamental, identitarian, way. In a very powerful way, we are our culture(s). Americans, for example, are meat eaters, heavy meat eaters. We eat a lot of meat. And, beyond that, we like the high end cuts, which industrial agriculture has made broadly affordable — center cut pork chops, for example, often go on sale at supermarkets for $2.00/lb or less. Ninety-nine percent of us approach meat consumption this way, though it is true that many of us cannot afford the high end cuts of even industrial meat. Those of us who can’t get our half pound per day from places like McDonald’s.

I argue regularly that we, as a culture, should eat less meat. But, at the same time, I continue to eat my normal share. Again, is this hypocrisy? Yes and no. Yes because I should act how I argue we should act. No because in making the argument I am imploring us, including myself, to act against our cultural impulses, that is, to act in direct opposition to our very identities; put simply, to be counter cultural.

Counter culturalism has a long history. People have been acting against the grain of their cultural impulses for eons. However, one thing about counter culturalism has remained consistent through the ages — only a tiny minority of any given cultural population acts counter culturally. Occasionally, this tiny minority, or at least the ideas of this tiny minority, catch the imaginations of the vast majority, and, over time, or quite suddenly, the dominant, majority culture shifts, adopting the attitudes and behavior of the counter cultural movement, in effect making what was a minority counter culture, the majority dominant culture.

However, this is exceedingly rare. Take (western) vegetarianism as an example. Western vegetarianism has a centuries long tradition (note: NOT veganism, which is new). Yet, today, after literally centuries of counter cultural arguments in favor of vegetarianism, often made by some very famous and charismatic people, only about 1% of the population is vegetarian.

Why is that? Because culture dominates us. It makes us who we are. And, we are meat eaters. We want to see our chops, our steaks, our burgers, and our birds taking up most of our plates.

I wish this weren’t the case, and I will continue to argue that we should be otherwise, that we should change our dominant culture. I will continue to implore myself to be otherwise. And, it appears, at least for the near term, though I do feel some fissures forming, I will continue to disappoint myself.

How is it that someone that feels as strongly as I do about the importance of eating less meat — for so many powerful reasons — cannot eat less meat?

It is simple, really. Counter culturalism takes firm determination and stamina. That is, it takes sustained willfulness. It takes forcefulness to say no to the ideas in one’s head, to the face in the mirror. And, such sustained willfulness in the face of the power of one’s dominant culture is terribly rare. I wish it weren’t the case. If it weren’t so rare, change, positive change, would be so much easier to enact, but, then again, so would negative change.

The argument, therefore, that local-regional meat can easily be made affordable by choosing cheap cuts and/or eating less meat is specious. It is in fact deeply regressive as it takes as its driving principle forced counter culturalism. It demands of people, in an unfair, and unwarranted way that they, by dint of the fact of their limited means, act against the grain of their dominant culture, against their very identities — not because they themselves have arrived at a determined, invested counter cultural impulse, but because they are poor. While perhaps well-intentioned, people making such arguments are in fact being oppressive.

While I, too, am likely to be accidentally oppressive in other ways, when it comes to the affordability of local-regional meat, I am not, I refuse to be. It is not incumbent on the person of limited means to be Herculean, to act in counter cultural ways to make local-regional meat affordable. It is incumbent on us, the producers, processors, distributors, and more well off consumers of local-regional meat to find ways to make local-regional meat more affordable within our dominant cultural paradigm. (At the same time, however, we need to continue to act to change the dominant culture)

The ways to do so are pretty straightforward on paper, but will take a lot of work in practice. They are primarily infrastructural: we need to build local-regional production, processing, and distribution infrastructures that, once in place, will substantially cut the costs of local-regional meat. But, they are also cultural: for example, we absolutely do need to eat less meat — nevertheless, we need to reject forced counter culturalism as an answer to the problem of the high price of local-regional meat.

The movement is in motion. It is, for the most part as I see it, heading in the right direction. It is time now to take the next step, to move beyond the face-to-face markets (which are themselves counter cultural, but that is another post) to markets that are more broadly cultural, to markets — faceless though they might be — with infrastructures underlying them that are capable of making local-regional meat broadly affordable.

As ever, let’s get to work.

Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

A couple of years ago at a farmer’s market a woman approached my stall, a little apprehensively. She looked old and beaten down. Her face was weathered and worn. Her hands looked rough and gritty. But, it was clear that she was younger than she looked. Her clothes were poor. Her jeans were worn thin around the knees and had faded spots of dirt here and there on her thighs. Before she even said a word, I imagined a life of hard work and hard times for her.

She came over to the stall and without looking up at me started looking over the meat case, and then after a moment, she fingered the edge of the price sheet for a moment and then picked it up to take a closer look.

As she looked, I waited, without saying anything, wondering how things were going to go. I had long ago stopped stereotyping people. Yes, I had imagined a hard life for her, but that didn’t mean that she wasn’t willing to pay half a day’s wages on pasture-raised, local pork, or grassfed lamb. I’d been surprised by too many people to make that mistake again.

She carefully placed the price sheet back on the table and placed the small orange wee-bee little pumpkin paper weight back on top of it.

Then for the first time, she looked up at me. I smiled.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello,” she said, and then as we looked at each other silently for a moment, I was taken very much by surprise. Her eyes quickly welled up with tears; one slipped out and slid slowly down her cheek. She raised a hand up and wiped it off. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied.

“It’s just…it’s just that I am so frustrated.”

I didn’t say anything. It was clear that she wanted to speak her peace.

After a moment, still with tear filled eyes, she said, “You know, I want…,” she wiped another tear away, “…I want so badly to stop eating grocery store meat. It’s terrible. Terrible for you. It tastes terrible. It’s all full of crap, hormones, drugs, and God knows what.”

I nodded.

“But this,” she said, sweeping a hand over the meat case, “I just can’t afford it, any of it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, a little uncomfortable and slightly embarrassed. I looked away from her, around the rest of the farmers market. The people at the market were not monolithically well off, or white. It was not just soccer moms and exuberant well-off foodies. But, it was close.

I didn’t know what to say. I had often been confronted by people over the price of my meat. “That’s ridiculous!” “So expensive!” “Phhftt!” One old lady even said, “you should be ashamed!” Little did she know that I already was, always had been.

I had set out in farming with a mission, to offer ethically and ecologically raised meat at the lowest price possible, low enough even for people like the woman standing in front of me at that moment. But, I quickly discovered that this was a pipe dream. I couldn’t sell pork chops for less than $7.00/lb. and keep the farm going, and even at that price, my wife would still need to continue subsidizing the farm.

The low-volume, direct market system makes it impossible. The costs are simply too high. USDA slaughter and butchering alone doubles the cost of getting the animal to market. A lamb has $3.00/lb. of small-scale, local slaughter and butchering in it! A pig, $2.00/lb.

The woman standing in front of me had no idea how angry and frustrated I was. She had no idea that her tears were my tears. I had set out to make meat broadly affordable, but instead, I was selling exclusive, high priced meat to the well-off.

As she stood in front of me, we were both pissed off, but I didn’t let on. She was the one crying.

“I’ve heard so many good things about local meat, but I’ve never even been able to try it,” she went on. “I’ve heard it tastes better, it’s better for you.” Her eyes were drying up.

“It does,” I said, “and it is.”

She looked at me.

Without thinking about it, I reached into the meat case and pulled out a package of two center cut pork chops and placed them in a paper bag. I folded the top of the bag over itself a couple of times and held the package out in the space between us.

“Here,” I said, “I want you to have this. You should at least get to try it.”

“No,” she said, taking a half a step backwards. “I can’t just take it.”

“It’s okay, really. I want you to have it.”

“No.” She took another half a step backward.

I was about to lose her.

“OK, wait,” I said, holding up my free hand to keep her from walking away. “How about this. Take the chops. Try them. If you like them, then you can come back and pay me whatever you can afford. Does that work?”

She took a step forward returning to our shared space. I continued to hold the paper bag out between us.

“OK,” she said, reaching out to take the bag. She took the bag from me. “OK,” she said, “thanks.”

“No problem.”

“I’ll be back,” she said, “I will.”

“I know,” I replied.

She turned and walked away.

The next week, just as I finished up handing some change to a customer, I looked up and there she was, holding a ten dollar bill out towards me.

“That’s more than they cost,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I don’t care, they were awesome.”

“Keep it,” I said, “I wanted you to have them.”

“No,” she said, “take it,” in such a way that I knew I had better just take the money, so I did.

“Let me get you some change,” I said, opening the cash box.

“No,” she said, raising her hands up to her shoulders, arms bent at the elbows, hands palm out, taking a step back and starting to turn. “Keep it,” and then she walked away.

I closed the cash box and watched her walk away.

In spite of the fact that my interaction with that woman has been a driving force in my desire to scale up the farm so that I could be in a position where economies of scale would make it possible for me to lower the cost of my meat, I have failed miserably. Yes, now I raise over 400 pigs per year, but the meat is not any cheaper. In fact, because most of it is marketed through a butcher shop in Chelsea Market, it is even more expensive. But, I haven’t given up yet.

I believe I have an ethical obligation to find a way to provide real food security for people of limited means. Nobody should have to cry because they can’t afford real food, which is one of the reasons I want to sell my pork in Price Chopper.

Of course, real food security is not only about developing infrastructures to make it possible to get local meat into supermarkets like Price Chopper. There is cultural work to do as well, including changing the “race to the bottom” supermarket mentality. Supermarket executives and managers need to be convinced of the value of supporting farmers by paying decent prices for non-industrial meat, and in turn, taking less of a profit margin to keep the prices down to help provide real food security. That is asking a lot of large corporations acting in competitive markets.

Is it too much to ask? The corporate mantra is that all that corporations do is give customers what they are asking for. So, let’s call them on it. Let’s start asking for broadly affordable local-regional meat that supports our local-regional farmers by compensating them fairly.

No more tears. Real food security is an ethical imperative.

About Who’s Walking Who
An ardent advocate on behalf of dogs for approximately 20 years, Stacy Alldredge is a specialist in canine behavior problems including aggression, separation anxiety, Obsessive/ Compulsive Disorder, and fear issues; big challenges that regularly confront the urban dog and their guardians. more…

About Our Dog Food
The combination of Stacy’s expertise as a canine nutritionist for 20 years and Dickson’s locally and naturally raised meat has produced a healthy and delicious recipe for our best friends.  We make all of our dog food with the same meats sold in the Chelsea Market shop and fresh produce.  All of the cooking, grinding and packaging takes place at the butcher shop.

Today’s Menu

• Doggy Basic Blend
• Beef Knuckle Bones
  

Ordering (212-242-2630)
All orders must be placed by 8pm on Friday as we make our dog food fresh each Saturday.  We recommend ordering the total number of meals you need for the whole week.  Packages will keep for 7 days fresh in your refrigerator, or can be easily frozen.

To Order, Call Dickson’s Farmstand at 212-242-2630

Pickup
Our dog food is ready for pickup in the store on Sunday-Tuesday during our regular store hours (below).

Pickup Hours :
Monday & Tuesday 10am-8pm
Sunday 10am-7pm

Have questions, concerns or need advice about keeping your dog happy and healthy?
Contact Stacy and her team at wwwdogs@aol.com

Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

Culture, like so many things that are so familiar they seem as if they are an organic thread in the fabric of existence is a relatively new concept. Culture itself has of course been around for eons. What is relatively new is our conceptualizations and various understandings of it, beginning first with the idea that there is such a thing as culture at all.

While theories about culture — ie, explanations and understandings of it — abound and are often in conflict, one thing is certain about it, culture is dynamic, it changes, sometimes slowly and in subtle ways, sometimes suddenly and dramatically.

For me culture is constitutive of identity. That is “I” am my culture. However, also for me, one’s identity is not constituted by a single culture — we are an amalgam of dominant and minor cultures that permeate us less in a hierarchical way than in the random and ever changing way that the little bits in a snow globe gyre and tumble around, only with identity, some of those bits are bigger than others.

One of our most hubristic notions about culture is that we can control it, we can change it, we can intentionally shape it and mold it. If we don’t like a culture, or our culture, we can simply reformulate that culture into something we do like. This was a particularly powerful idea in the 20th century, especially amongst the communists — eg, Mao Tse Tung’s cultural revolution, Che Guevara’s belief in the necessity of the intentional “birth” of Socialist Man, and though not necessarily communist, the belief in the 1960s that protest, song, and other arts could bring about revolutionary cultural change.There are plenty of other examples.

We believed, very strongly in some cases, in the possibility of manufacturing culture — the late 19th and early 20th c. “science” of eugenics was about culture, ie, through breeding, we could make what has come to be referred to as “the other” more like us.

As far as I am concerned, culture, if one will permit me the mistake of speaking in such a way, has always eluded us. And, if it doesn’t elude us, it surprises us. A revolution in culture sparks the spinning of the cultural wheels along a new path, but we suddenly find that while we supplied the spark to get the wheels spinning, culture — again, please forgive me — has a mind of its own, and begins to travel along paths we did not, could not, have imagined. Our best efforts become our worst nightmare as Woodstock is reborn, sponsored by Pepsi.

So, as I see it we in the local-regional farm and food systems movement are faced with a conundrum. About 1-2%, maybe 3% of total food sales can be considered local (various localities and regions have substantially higher rates). An honest assessment of such a statistic reveals a simple, though troubling, and for the hyperlocavore and ardent advocate, devastating truth — nobody is buying local, in spite of the fact that the movement is a media darling, and in spite of the fact that such behemoths as Wal-Mart are responding to it/to us.

Why is nobody buying local? Culture answers a great deal of that question, though of course it is not the whole answer. Since the Renaissance, our (western) culture has been on a seemingly inexorable path culminating (I hope it is at its culmination) in our 21st c. rampantly globalized consumerist individualism, that is to a very large degree shaped, molded, and made manifest by the alluring power of mass media.

The conundrum therefore is this: in addition to the necessity of making the tremendous infrastructural changes that we need to make, we need to make equally tremendous cultural changes, but how on earth do we do that when “history” shows us that even if we are able to start the wheels spinning culture veers out of our control?

Frankly, I am terrified of attempting to engineer culture, in the same way that I am terrified by our attempts to engineer genes. Take the culture of organic for example. The meteoric growth of organic sales over the past decade and a half has been driven not by the foundational culture of organic, but almost completely by the commodification and industrialization of organic production, processing, and distribution, something that the foundational organic culture was once inimical to. Today, I, along with millions of others, though not as many millions as we think (~3% market share), pull commodified, industrialized organic cereal off the shelf and drop it in our shopping carts with a sense of accomplishment. We are, to hit the point with a sledge hammer, potentially on the verge of organic high fructose corn syrup.

Regardless of the dangers, regardless of the 1) resistance of culture to intentionally wrought change and 2) the slipperiness of culture in the midst of change, one cannot deny that we have tremendous cultural work to do in order to expand the local-regional “market” from its piddly 1-3% to 30%, or even more. Without cultural changes, any infrastructural development we make will be lost on us.

1. We need to change our culture of convenience into a culture that is satisfied with laborious, though not demanding, work.
2. We need to change our culture of cheap into a culture that recognizes the multidimensional value and importance of well-made, well-produced food and other “stuff” that once again takes a much bigger chunk of our annual incomes.
3. We need to change our culture of fast into a culture that is not just slower, but more evenly, more sustainably paced.
4. We need to change our globalized culture into a culture that, to quote a bumper sticker, “Acts Local [Regional], Thinks Global.” The people of the world, especially when they are in trouble, matter, and we should care about them and help them and get to know them and live with them, but when it comes to our three a day, we need to live closer to home.
5. We need to change our atomized family culture into a culture that binds families (and communities) together.
6. We need to change our drive-thru culture into a culture that eats at home, together, around a table, sitting in chairs (with no texting allowed at the table!)
7. We need to change our culture of hedonistic meat consumption to a culture of moderation.
8. We need to change our culture of…

But, I pause as the conundrum rears its head, how?

I have one and only one answer, in two parts:

1. We close our eyes and take the plunge and ignore the risks inherent in the hubris of manufacturing cultural change.
2. Culture, at its “atomic” level, is linguistic, ie, we are constituted by culture in and through language, so, quite simply, we talk, and write, and yes, even sing, to each other, until we are blue in the face, and our hands are cramped.

Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

Recently an environmental science and photography student from NYU came out to the farm to work on a farm to table project. She is also a vegan. In addition to seeing my farm, we planned to visit my local slaughterhouse, and a local farm where I get the grain I feed to the pigs.

After a tour of the farm, we had about half an hour before it was time to leave for the slaughterhouse, so we went inside for a cup of coffee, during which I brought up the fact that she is a vegan, and questioned why she would choose a livestock farm as her farm to table project. Her answer was very reasonable and straightforward: if people are going to eat meat, the animals should be humanely raised and killed. As a vegan, she was willing to accept that most people would continue to eat meat; she just hoped that the animals wouldn’t come from factory farms and wouldn’t be killed in industrial slaughterhouses.

After our cup of coffee, we hopped into her car and started off for the slaughterhouse, which is about twenty minutes from my place. On the way, I reiterated that I thought she would have fairly limited access to the kill floor. My expectation was that she would get to stand in the doorway and take pictures from there.

However, much to my surprise, when we showed up and I introduced the student to the slaughterman running the kill floor, he immediately invited her in. First the student had to don a white coat and a hard hat, which she happily did. She, a vegan, was almost giddy with the excitement of being given access to the whole kill floor.

There were only two rules: 1) One is not allowed to take pictures of the USDA inspector (a USDA rule) and 2) She was not allowed to take pictures of the act of stunning the animal or slitting its throat (a slaughterhouse rule, promulgated not out of a feeling that they have anything to hide, but out of a justified paranoia of potentially being portrayed in a bad light).

As she stepped past the threshold of the door onto the kill floor, I said, “just let me know when you’ve had enough, and we’ll go over to the cutting room.” In order to keep the kill floor from getting crowded, I hung out in the doorway and watched from there.

For the next half hour or so, the photography student poured over the kill floor, snapping photos of everything, only pausing when the slaugtherman brought a new pig onto the floor to kill. But, rather than turn away for the killing, since she couldn’t photograph it anyway, she watched, intently, as the slaughterman placed the captive bolt gun against the pigs forehead and activated it.

BANG! about as loud as a cap gun, and the pig dropped like a stone each time. Then she watched just as intently as the slaughterman put down the captive bolt gun and picked up his knife, which he deftly and expertly plunged into the pig causing the blood to gush out in a huge stream. A moment later, which is why you have to act fast when killing pigs, the pig’s death throes started, which, compared to other animals, is very violent. The pig, unconscious from the blow of the captive bolt gun, and quickly dying and then already dead, thrashes around like mad. It is in fact the most difficult part of watching a pig killed because it is so easy to imagine that the pig is thrashing around because it is in pain (and, I grant the possibility, though remote, that we do not properly understand the physiology of death and the pig is in pain, in which case what we are doing is very much an ethical transgression). Nevertheless, as soon as the slaughterman pulled the knife out of the pig and stepped away, the student rushed in to start snapping photos again.

She took pictures of everything: of the moments immediately following the kill, of the pig being hoisted up by a hind leg to finish bleeding out and then be hosed off, of the pig being skinned, of the pig’s head being cut off, of the pig being disemboweled, of the pig being split in half with a bone saw, and finally of the pig halves being run down the rail to the cooler.

The whole time, too, she was aware that these were my pigs that were being killed. Not the very pigs that she had just seen alive and well on my farm, but the same pigs, nonetheless. They were not abstract pigs. They had faces and attitudes and personalities. They had lives that she had witnessed and documented just before seeing them killed.

I thought she would never tire of the kill floor, and I think she might not have. It seemed that everything attracted her. When not much was going on, she pointed her camera down at the floor and snapped pictures of spatters of blood and bits of skin and fat, the detritus of death.

Every now and then, however, she would look at me, and say, “just a few more minutes.” Until finally, she walked over to me and said, “OK. I’m ready.”

From there we moved on to the cutting room, where for our safety, we had to stand behind the cutting table, between it and the wall. There is a cinder block on the floor, the primary purpose of which is to put the middle leg of the table on at the end of the day after it has been scrubbed clean and hosed off to drain, but it also makes an excellent perch from which to take photographs.

The cutting room is a very different place than the kill floor. Everything is pretty familiar. As the carcasses come out of the cooler, they are quickly broken down into cuts that we are used to seeing in packages at the supermarket. Nevertheless, she snapped away, just as excitedly as she had on the kill floor.

After about a half an hour in the cutting room, we were ready to go. We said our thanks and left.

On the way back to my place we were pretty quiet, but at one point she said, “You know, it wasn’t that bad.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” I said. “My first time there, I was surprised at how easy it was to watch my animals be killed. After thinking about it, I realized that it is because the place, the whole place, everything about it, from the tile walls, to the hard hats, to the stainless steel, to the chains and pulleys of the hoists, to the attitudes of the people working on the floor, is designed and organized to do the job. Somehow that design and organization makes it so that on the kill floor, killing seems perfectly normal, natural, even.

You don’t even need to distance yourself from it. You can watch, you can stand there and say to yourself, okay, this is my pig, a pig that I cared for three times a day for five months, you can even recognize the pig — oh, look, that’s that pig that liked to have its belly scratched so much that it would topple over onto its side as soon as you started rubbing it — and then BANG! the pig drops like a stone and the wheels of the machine, yes, a killing machine, start rolling, so smoothly that there is no question whether it is right or wrong. From start to finish it is exactly as it should be. Simply put, it just is. You know what I mean?” I turned my head to look at her while she was driving.

“Yeah,” she said, nodding her head slowly, “I do. It wasn’t that bad,” she said again.

Bob Comis operates Stony Brook Farm in Schoharie New York where he and his wife pasture raise heritage breed pigs, lamb, goat and poultry. In his posts, Bob shares his thoughts on farming, regional food systems, and how it all could be better and different.

When it comes to discussions of agriculture, be it industrial/factory-type farming or otherwise, I do not like the concept of sustainability, primarily because sustainability as a critique of industrial agriculture is very tenuous. All that industrial agriculture need do is prove itself sustainable, or become sustainable, and the critique is turned on its head.

However, as a question, sustainability does interest me, especially as it relates to my own farm.

Am I farming sustainably? That is, am I farming in such a way that the land I work will be as, or even more, productive for future generations? Or, am I farming unsustainbly, that is, will the ability of future generations to produce on land that I am working today be comprised by how I am working that land?

Mine is a pasture-based farm, so one might intuitively say yes, that I am farming sustainably. However, because I raise pigs, I have chosen for their pastures high protein and high energy annual pasture crops rather than mixed grass permanent pastures. This means that every year, at least once, the pig pastures are plowed and planted. To do this, I use a 100 hp tractor and a four bottom plow. The fields must also be disced once, twice, or three times to prepare a seed bed and to control weeds. Finally, the seed needs to be sown, and in the case of corn, the crop needs to be cultivated to control weeds. All of this takes diesel fuel, a lot of diesel fuel. Diesel, of course, is a form of refined crude oil. Our oil reserves, as we know, are depleting.

Therefore, in a peak oil, or post-peak oil, era, my farming practices are problematic. However, it is no large leap to imagine alternatively powered tractors that are every bit as powerful as today’s diesel tractors. So, for me, motive power is not a sustainability question, except in so far as the more diesel we use the quicker our oil reserves will dry up (and to be perfectly honest, I don’t think that is such a bad thing).

As above, the sustainability question for me is about the land. Are my practices harming the land? Are they merely benign? Or, are they in fact improving the land, which is the highest form of sustainability?

Take plowing first. It is highly problematic as it exposes bare, unachored top soil to the elements, to wind and rain/snow, which causes erosion. I work a hillside farm, so I cannot afford to lose a lot of topsoil as there is very little to begin with, and because of the pitch of some of the fields, they are more highly erodible than flat ground.

To mitigate top soil loss, I leave the soil bare for as short a time as I can, and try, as best I can, to keep it covered with a cover crop (generally annual rye grass) over the highly erosive seasons of late fall, winter, and early spring. The cover crop anchors the soil. Nevertheless, bare soil erodes. Period.

Plowing also creates a compacted “hard pan” a few inches below the deepest penetration of the plow. Over time this hard pan can become so compacted that roots (going down) and nutrients (coming up) have difficulty penetrating it. Water drainage can also become a problem. Discing is also a compaction operation.

Thus, in addition to causing erosion problems, plowing and discing cause important soil structure problems. Hard pan can be mitigated by crop rotation, and crops planted specifically to break it up, such as tillage radishes which jab through the hard pan like spears, down as far as three feet, loosen the hard pan up. Hard pan can also be mitigated mechanically using a tractor-drawn tool called a sub-soiler or middle buster.

What about fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides? Am I “poisoning” the land or water in any way? I use no petrochemicals on the land. Fertilizer comes from animal manure (pig, primarily, but also sheep) spread directly by the animals themselves during the growing season, and by me in the spring, and also by spreading the winter bedding packs, compost, an excellent soil structure and slow release fertilizer amendment, and green manures like the clovers and buckwheat, which are not grown for harvest by animal or machine, but in order to plow or disc back into the ground, providing fertility in the process of decomposition. I use no herbicides or other pesticides.

Instead of utilizing annual crops that require plowing and discing, should I just keep the pigs on permanent mixed grass pastures to preserve the top soil and soil structure, even though these permanent pastures provide very little in the way of pig nutrition? Pigs need to get concentrated energy from somewhere, so if I am not plowing myself, some farmer somewhere else is plowing to grow the grain that the pigs need.

So, am I farming sustainably? If not, what should I change?